AUSTIN, Tex. â€" Ever since I’ve been coming to the South by Southwest Music Festival (and the CMJ Music Marathons, too), I’ve been running across young bands aiming to recreate the psychedelia of the late 1960s â€" which is, as the years go by, a time before many of them were born. You might expect that as the era recedes, so do its traditions, not to mention the inevitable breakdown and disappearance of authentic equipment. And beyond the indie-rock circuit, it’s pretty unlikely that that totally 1960s-style psychedelia would become a commercial force. But against those odds, young bands keep doing the 1960s better.
One band straight out of the time capsule was Outer Minds from Chicago, which combines a garage-rock drive, and the bite of a Farfisa organ, with a deep understanding of Jefferson Airplane â€" the eager three-part harmonies, the right combination of fuzz and reverb on a 12-string electric guitar, the cosmic musings in the lyrics.
Another was Föllakzoid, a self-described “cosmic music†band from Santiago, Chile, that lives for drones, repetition, reverberations and galvanizing buildups: meditations that gradually turn into eruptions. The band draws on the legacies of Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Can and Neu, starting with steady-state riffs that have analog synthesizer parts swooping around, and soon putting everything up for grabs; a vocal drifts in occasionally, but soon gets swept up in the surging, pulsating momentum.
Ives Sepulveda, who plays keyboards in Föllakzoid, also brought his other band, The Holydrug Couple, which moves him to guitar and shifts the music toward the late-1960s power trio: more aggressive, more lead guitar, still making every sprawl worthwhile. The only glimmer of the present was the visuals, which included light-show liquid blobs being shaken on the spot, ! but also had op-art moires and infinite spirals generated from a laptop to make the music even more immersive: a forgivable anachronism.
